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I’ve never used a laptop like the Lenovo Legion 9i. This is the only laptop I’ve given a perfect score, which you can read about in my Lenovo Legion 9i review, putting many of the best gaming laptops to shame. It’s out of reach for most people and certainly too expensive for me. But I haven’t been able to touch a laptop this year that excited me as much as the Legion 9i.
Sure, it’s a powerful laptop, but if you’re spending $3,000 (or more) on a gaming laptop, you expect top-notch performance. What makes the Legion 9i so outstanding is the refinement it brings to this class of laptop. It incorporates all the elements that make 16-inch desktop alternatives impractical and leave users turned upside down. This isn’t a perfect laptop, and while no laptop is perfect, it’s the closest to perfect I’ve seen this year.
Slimming
A big part of that is the Legion 9i’s size. There’s also legitimate criticism that the Legion 9i is too expensive, and a lot of that goes back to Lenovo’s other laptops. Lenovo’s own Legion Pro 7i has comparable specs and costs nearly $1,000 less than the Legion 9i. But the Legion 9i justifies its starting price of $3,150 in several ways.
For me, size is important. It’s a quarter inch thinner and over half a pound lighter than the Legion Pro 7i. The Legion 9i has a 24-core CPU that requires more power. The Legion 9i definitely falls into the class of desktop replacement laptops. This is a huge laptop that historically tries to deliver the best performance at any cost.
When you look at the laptops that the Legion 9i competes with (like the MSI GT77 Titan and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17), it looks downright small. Lenovo has managed to pack the most powerful hardware money can buy into an incredibly portable laptop. No, when you look at the spec sheet, that portability doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you toss the laptop into your backpack, it quickly becomes important.
Size is just one axis of Lenovo’s focus on portability. Lenovo includes a 140W USB-C charger in addition to a large 330-watt power brick. This is not a paid additional charge. It’s just included. This is very useful if you carry your laptop around and don’t want to carry around a huge power supply. It’s clear that Lenovo has actually thought about how people use their laptops, instead of ignoring and paying attention to the most powerful hardware like many desktop alternatives do.
It’s important for a laptop to be small, but the Legion 9i doesn’t sacrifice power in the process. It even managed to outperform the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 in my testing. Meanwhile, we recorded frame rates close to 100 frames per second (fps) at native resolution of 3.2K in demanding games such as: Returnal, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Difference with water cooling
This is a proper desktop replacement, not one with crimped edges to fill a portable form factor like the Asus ROG Zephyrus M16. A big reason for that is the liquid cooling system that the Legion 9i uses.
This system runs on the GPU’s memory and only kicks in when the temperature gets too high. If you just look at the laptop’s overall temperature, the liquid cooling doesn’t seem to be doing much good. It won’t keep your Legion 9i cool. This allows Legion 9i to be more compact.
It’s easy to forget that liquid cooling is working, but that’s exactly how it should be. We’ve seen liquid cooling in laptops before, but all of those implementations used clunky external pumps that were strapped to a desk. Lenovo has applied liquid cooling to the Legion 9i, making it more portable rather than less portable.
Water cooling is a key part of what makes the Legion 9i so exciting. It applies enthusiast technology in a mainstream way, offering the benefits of portability rather than extreme overclocking ability. The Legion 9i is about the same thickness as Razer’s highly portable Blade 14. This is insane for a gaming laptop with an RTX 4090 and a 24-core Intel CPU.
Expensive but not crazy
However, we need to talk about the pricing of this room. The Legion 9i’s price tag is over $3,000, which is too high for most people, but it’s surprisingly close to the competition. Its most direct competitor is Alienware x16. An Alienware machine with the less powerful Core i9-13900HK costs about $150 more ($3,300 at the time of writing) when configured with an RTX 4080. Oddly enough, the tables are turned for the RTX 4090 configuration, with the Lenovo laptop costing nearly $500 more ($3,100 compared to $3,576).
There are also many more expensive laptops in this class. The Razer Blade 16 costs $3,600 with an RTX 4080, and the MSI GT77 Titan costs a whopping $4,900 with an RTX 4090. Even Asus’ ROG Strix Scar 17 is $3,500 with an RTX 4090. The Legion 9i is expensive, no question, but not unreasonable compared to other options in this price range.
The Legion 9i goes above and beyond in ways no other laptop can. As mentioned above, the purchase comes with a separate 140W charger, along with a set of replaceable keycaps. However, nothing matches the screen. Lenovo has included his 3,200 x 2,000 mini LED display with DisplayHDR 1000 certification. It comes with a full array of 1,536 local dimming zones and looks great.
These additional features don’t justify the Legion 9i’s price on their own, but if you’ve already spent more than $3,000 on the laptop, these can help it stand out in a tough crowd. . Other desktop alternatives feel like powerful laptops. Lenovo not only offers powerful laptops with Legion 9i, but also a premium experience packed with benefits.
glimpse of greatness
I don’t recommend Legion 9i to everyone. It’s not a laptop with the perfect balance of price and performance like Lenovo’s Legion Pro 5. However, it’s definitely the most exciting laptop we’ve reviewed in 2023. That’s what I thought even months after reviewing it. ” I still check the Lenovo website to see if I can get any deals.
This is one of the rare examples of true innovation in gaming laptops, with component replacements in years when new hardware is available and minor redesigns in years when it’s not. It is a market where Lenovo took a risk with the Legion 9i, and it paid off. As such, this is the most exciting laptop I’ve used all year.
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